Nouwen's invitation to conversation . . . .
Since the beginning of 2017, I have been participating in an online book club hosted by an organization called Renovaré (thanks, Mom and Dad, for the sweet Christmas gift). Although I've encountered many quotations from Henri Nouwen's writings, I hadn't read an entire book. And I wasn't disappointed; reading his Life of the Beloved has not only been timely for me, but also profoundly impactful. Nouwen, a Catholic priest, wrote the book at the request of a friend, NYT journalist Fred Bratman, a secular Jew, who asked him to discuss Christian faith in a way that "speaks to men and women in a secularized society" in a way that "he and his friends 'could hear.'" Life of the Beloved is the result of that request. I won't discuss the content of the book here (there is my thinly disguised attempt to encourage you to read it for yourself--it's that good). What's fascinating, though, is that Nouwen initially considered h